Posts Tagged ‘esotericism’

• Lydia Crabtree not only knows “woo,” she can organize it into a ten-part scale and a four-part diagram. Fascinating. And there is a Part 2: “Parenting to the WooWoo.” • Where did “the humanities” come from? Come travel back to the good old days of “philology.” • Philology is not old enough for you? […]

If you thought that everything has been said about Aleister Crowley, think again. There is Henrik Bogdan and Martin Starr’s new edited collection, Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, which I have to buy. Also on my reading list is Marco Pasi’s Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics. Had the universe moved slightly differently, I […]

Robert Mathiesen and Theitic, The Rede of the Wiccae: Adriana Porter, Gwen Thompson and the Birth of a Tradition of Witchcraft (Providence, R.I.: Olympic Press, 2005), 167 pp., $17.95 (paper). • • • Gwen Thompson (Craft name of Phyllis Healy), 1928–1986, founded the New England Coven of Traditional Witches in the late 1960s. It went […]

In February I linked to a description of a “magickal revival” in New York City. People say these things are cyclical. Now Joe “Vampires” Laycock weighs in: “Why Hipsters May Be Perfect Source for Brooklyn Occult Revival,” a sort of Durkheimian look at the same idea. More than their magical services, magicians offer their clients […]

Neil Degrasse Tyson’s remake of Cosmos tries to remake Giordano Bruno as a martyr of modern science, but he was nothing of the kind. He was a lot more of an occultist. Even The Daily Beast gets it. As Discover magazine’s Corey Powell pointed out, the philosophers of the 16th century weren’t anything like scientists […]

From The Revealer (see blogroll under Religion and Journalism): “Chapel Perilous: Notes From The New York Occult Revival.” There’s been a magical revival happening in New York City for two to three years,” Damon Stang, the “shop witch” for Catland Books in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, told the New York Times last year. “I […]

¶ That Doggerland existed is not news (do you expect breaking archeology news in the Daily Mail?) but here are some cool images of this lost land. I am still waiting for someone to create an authentic Pagan tradition based there. ¶ Ethan Doyle White interviews a Norwegian scholar of Paganism and esotericism, Egil Asprem. […]

¶ The 6th Israeli Conference for the Study of Contemporary Religion and Spirituality (PDF) includes some Pagan-friendly themes. ¶ The Association for the Study of Esotericism will meet in June at Colgate University in upstate New York. Egil Asprem has more to say about that one. ¶ The Conference on Current Pagan Studies, held in […]

Last night I watched The Master, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Joaquin Phoenix, respectively playing an L. Ron Hubbard-type esoteric group’s leader (making stuff up as he goes), his wife and collaborator, and an erratic alcoholic sailor who becomes, for a time, his follower. I rented it mainly because I have long been […]